The Promise of Lower Costs and Quality Education

Competition is wonderful. A Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun, starts his own online instructional company and gets a six-digit number of participants. No doubt worried about the implications of this, Stanford teams with Princeton, Michigan and Penn to offer free online courses. Afraid of being left out, Harvard now has teamed with M.I.T. High quality, rigorous courses are appearing online. This joins other pioneering efforts at low price instruction: StraighterLine, Khan Academy, the Saylor Foundation’s free courses, etc. And it also joins a growing for-profit industry presence that, despite publicity to the contrary, on the whole is student-centered and often high quality, although by no means free.

One obstacle: the socialization and networking aspect of college -- in other words, booze and sex -- are hard to provide online.

Previous university efforts have floundered because of the anti-innovation culture of higher education, especially manifested in faculty resistance. However, these new courses are free, and grades and “certificates” are granted. There are two obstacles, however, limiting the potential success of these ventures. First, students and employers want “diplomas” (skill certification), which random certificates for individual courses probably will not meet. Second, for large numbers, college is as much a socialization and networking as an intellectual exercise, and such accoutrements of college life as booze and sex are hard to provide online.

Nonetheless, this has great promise, leading to lower cost quality higher education by sidestepping the three greatest enemies to achieving that objective: the federal government (through their perverse financial incentives via dysfunctional student aid programs and myriad regulatory obstacles), the accreditation agencies (with their barriers to entry), and the faculty of traditional colleges. These providers, whose students are not dependent on federal financial aid, can just say no to traditional accreditation and start their own accrediting agency or rely on others (i.e., Underwriters Laboratories, Educational Testing Service, ACT) to bundle together courses to provide degrees. Necessity is the mother of invention.